ICC Commercial Crime Service

Canada: Litigation Funding Report

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a roundtable centered on how litigation finance could enhance Canada’s legal market. The discussion, hosted by Bentham IMF, also touched upon the legal and ethical considerations found in litigation-funding matters.

While the litigation-funding model is relatively new in Canada, funders are diligently assessing the market for valuable cases.

It’s all about realizing whether litigation is an asset or a liability, depending on whether you’re making a claim or defending it. Once determined to be an asset, funding will be viewed by a greater number of larger corporations as a way to manage their litigation and get the risk off their balance sheets. This is what is happening in the U.S., Australia and the U.K.

Undoubtedly, litigation finance will change things for the legal market and law firms, especially in Toronto. Here, case size has to be pretty substantial -- $10 million to $15 million -- before funders would become interested. The benefit, though, to otherwise dormant litigation is that third-party litigation funding will allow these substantial cases to go forward.

Click here to review the white paper released by Bentham IMF including the roundtable’s findings.

Lincoln Caylor of Bennett Jones is recognized as a “leading counsel and commentator in the asset recovery field,” by Chambers Canada 2016, and is listed as a Most Highly Regarded Individual in North America by Who’s Who Legal: Asset Recovery 2016. The sole Toronto member of ICC FraudNet, he is internationally recognized for leading state-of-the-art asset tracing investigations and pursuing asset recovery litigation and enforcement actions in prominent, high-value international financial frauds and other economic crimes.





ICC FraudNet is an international network of independent lawyers who are leading civil asset recovery specialists in each country. Recognized by Chambers Global as the world’s leading asset recovery legal network, our membership extends to every continent and the world’s major economies, as well as leading offshore wealth havens that have complex bank secrecy laws and institutions where the proceeds of fraud often are hidden. Founded in 2004 by the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the world’s business organization, FraudNet operates under the auspices of the ICC’s London-based Commercial Crime Services unit.